John Whalen, PhD

John Whalen, PhD

11.9K Subscribers

CEO, AI Research Leader, Cognitive Scientist, O'Reilly Author

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John Whalen, PhD will transform your research with Agentic AI

I’m CEO of Brilliant Experience, have a PhD in cognitive science, and wrote Design for How People Think (O’Reilly).

For 20 years, I’ve helped teams at companies like Google, GSK, and Capital One better understand their customers, capture insights, and build better products.

When AI started reshaping research, I got curious and learned. My team ran “AI vs. Humans” studies to see where AI excels, where human judgment matters most, and how to effectively blend both.

I’ll teach you how to create trustworthy AI research workflows that let you trace every step and insight.

Then advance to the next course and learn to orchestrate agentic research teams, work strategically with synthetic users grounded in real data, and bring in human judgement so you can scale research without losing rigor.

Key Clients
Google
Capital One
Bloomberg
GSK
Pinterest

Alumni reviews

Catherine

Live cohort
Product Research & Insights · Salesforce (Informatica)

Agentic AI for Research: Build Custom Workflows & Synthetic Users

Highly recommend John’s Maven course on Agentic AI for Research! The hands-on projects translate directly into real-world UXR applications, and the depth of the material is exceptional, allowing me to continuously refine and improve my multi-agent workflows.

Nitya

Live cohort
Senior Consumer Insights Researcher · Familiar Machines & Magic

Agentic AI for Research: Build Custom Workflows & Synthetic Users

John is an excellent teacher. The course gave me valuable hands on experience building multi-agent systems for research, while also giving me a clear conceptual framework for approaching this work. I left with a practical process I can immediately implement at my workplace, along with a much better understanding of which parts of the research process I can trust AI to support and where human judgment still matters. I also appreciated the opportunity to explore tools like Vurvey and have thoughtful discussions with peers about emerging areas like synthetic data and synthetic users.

Crystal

Live cohort
UX designer · Self Employed

AI for Customer Research: Deliver Trusted Insights at Scale

The course was very well organized with really good homework. I came out very confident to use all the tools. I highly recommend this to keep up to speed with research in this current climate!

Jasmine

Live cohort
User Researcher · -

AI for Customer Research: Deliver Trusted Insights at Scale

Knowledgeable course instructor and you get hands-on experience with AI tools

Kim

Live cohort
User Researcher · ida GmbH

AI for Customer Research: Deliver Trusted Insights at Scale

It was a brilliant experience and I learned so much even I could only watch the recordings. Thank you John for sharing all these new possibilities!